Sept 11 (Reuters) - U.S. energy firms cut oil rigs for a
second week in a row, data showed on Friday, a sign the latest
price declines may be causing some drillers to put on hold their
recently announced plans to return to the well pad.

Drillers removed 10 rigs in the week ended Sept. 11 and 13
rigs in the week ended Sept. 4, bringing the total rig count
down to 652, after adding rigs in six of the past eight weeks,
oil services company Baker Hughes Inc said in its
closely followed report. That was the biggest two-week decline
since early May.

Those additions since the start of July showed some drillers
had followed through on plans to add rigs announced in May and
June when U.S. crude futures averaged $60 a barrel.

U.S. oil prices this week, however, averaged $45 a barrel,
down from an average of $47 last week.

Earlier Friday, U.S. crude prices were down more than 2
percent after two banks, Goldman Sachs and Commerzbank, both
slashed their crude forecasts, citing lingering oversupply
concerns and worries over China's economy.

"The oil market is even more oversupplied than we had
expected and we forecast this surplus to persist in 2016,"
Goldman said in a note entitled "Lower for even longer."

Drillers this week cut one oil rig in each of the four major
U.S. shale oil basins: the Eagle Ford in South Texas, Niobrara
in Colorado and Wyoming, Bakken in North Dakota and Montana, and
Permian in West Texas and eastern New Mexico.

In response to falling prices, U.S. oil production has
declined over the past several weeks with current output down to
about 9.1 million barrels per day last week from an average 9.6
million bpd from late May to mid July, the highest since the
early 1970s, according to government data.

Those output reductions occurred months after U.S. energy
firms slashed spending, cut thousands of jobs and idled around
60 percent of the record high 1,609 oil rigs that were active in
October as prices collapsed from around $107 a barrel in June
2014 to under $44 in January on lackluster global demand and
lingering oversupply concerns.
(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)